


character dynamics

by aut0_resp0nder



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Multi, Past Child Abuse, au where theyre happy teens PLS, back again with my usual brand of vague flowery humanstuck bullshit, its pretty quick though, liberal use of italics. sorry, oh also aradia and karkats house burns down. nobody dies though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 14:37:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17869118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aut0_resp0nder/pseuds/aut0_resp0nder
Summary: dave and vriska and sollux and karkat and aradia and john and first kisses and impromptu road trips and hair bleach and fire and mangrove trees and teenhood in michigan





	character dynamics

**Author's Note:**

> sorry for not posting very much school's been a bitch and i'm on a mob psycho 100 bender

hot cloud-soaked august thunder booms with a sudden rainy shout outside the screen door and vriska, startled, squeezes the water bottle in her hand _oh for fuck’s sake_ hard enough for three quarters of it to shoot out into her face and as she’s standing in the kitchen dripping wet sollux _laughs_ , harder than any of them have ever heard him laugh, and aradia cheers with glee as she plants a thousand and one lipstick prints on his flushed cheeks. karkat watches them with an expression that might be something like jealousy and in the back of dave’s head roxy’s soft voice whispers _carpe diem, bro_ but he doesn’t listen, he never does, and he regrets it. sollux chases a shrieking aradia out the back of vriska’s kitchen into the roaring storm at breakneck speed and tackles her to the dirty slick mulch like a fourth-grader on the school playground, grinding wet soil into her hair as she writhes in his arms and now it’s karkat who’s laughing his ass off at his sister’s misfortune, loud and real-life laughs from way down in his stomach. dave flushes red, and john pretends not to notice.

karkat and john argue over _no, you stupid idiot, peter parker is the best spiderman_ and _nuh-uh, it’s definitely miles morales, he's just cooler_ perched like bony teenage hawks on sollux’s bottom bunk. vriska stretches a skinny leg with a busted knee over the top bunk’s wood slats and down far enough for a bare foot to brush karkat’s forehead with a _quit sleeping on gwen stacy_ and a smile the color of the night sky. karkat snarls a toothless insult at her head of night-dark hair and yanks her by the ankle, laughing somewhat meanly at her undignified yelp of fear as she tumbles down into dave’s arms, his elbow blocking her from slamming her head into the hardwood floor. sollux peeks a head over from the back of the top bunk where vriska’d just vacated the rumpled sheets, sticking a studded tongue out at her extended middle fingers as aradia snorts into dave’s shoulder with her forehead on his collarbone and her arms draped around his neck. dave leans down and buries his nose into vriska’s grape-soda-smelling hair and stifles a snort when she shrieks that it tickles.

when they’re fourteen they pass a summer where dave goes through six pairs of sunglasses in the three months he’s out of school—knocking them with a straying elbow off a fishing dock into lake michigan, cracks them in two slamming smack into the blue and red bands of sollux’s shiny new braceface at terminal velocity, shatters the left lens when aradia manages to be so off-aim that she shoots it with a paintball gun, dropping them down into the black hole that exists where karkat’s dresser meets the wall. vriska and john grind flat pillows stained with hair dye into each other’s laughing faces in the dark sticky-hot depths of a late july night, vriska’s cheap foundation and waxy dollar-store lipstick smudging onto the fabric. aradia paints karkat’s nails black and red in the thin watery moonlight when everyone else is asleep, dave’s arms loose around karkat’s waist and sollux’s legs in vriska’s lap and john snoring like a buzzsaw running on fumes. months pass and little snow flurries spiral down from the steely clouds like they’re trapped in the world’s biggest snow globe, lightly and theatrically dusting aradia’s dark hair with tiny crystals and frosting over the flat lenses of dave’s sunglasses. john double-knots his scarf and sollux shoves his chilly hands in his pockets and karkat, not to be outdone, tugs his flimsy nylon windbreaker tighter against his collar gritting his teeth against the thin wind. the twin voices in dave’s head that sound just a little bit like dirk and hal tell him _hey, kid, don’t be a baby_ when he yells like a ten-year-old as a very much not-dead spider skitters across his hand while he’s cleaning the dirty corners of his bedroom, and the voices somehow manage to laugh and chastise at once as a fearless aradia heaves a sigh and comes over to kill it. karkat digs his fingers into vriska’s lightening roots, the caustic bleach ever-so-slightly searing the pads of his bare fingers as vriska tries not to cry hot tears of frustration at the world and everything from her living room to jupiter, the dye kit lying forlornly on the edge of the sink with the faucet running and karkat and vriska pressed as close together as they can possibly get with a desk chair and liquid bleach between them.

they go to the mall an hour before it closes, buying slices of lukewarm pizza and screaming in disgust as sollux dips it in ranch dressing, hiding out in the bathroom stifling their nervous delinquent giggles until there’s no one left but a tired janitor that tells them they’re okay to stay for a while as long as they don’t spend the night and don’t break any glass. they run with shoes smacking on the tile and fingers trailing windows, circling the perimeter of the whole place to get to the coldest drinking fountain (the one in front of spencer’s). karkat trips and /oh fuck oh fuck/ goes tumbling down the stopped escalator, aradia chasing after him like a worried mother hen, dave shouts that he warned him, bro, and john almost pukes from how hard he’s laughing—it’s a scientific fact, you know, water is wet, the sun is hot, and karkat vantas has two left feet. dave drops a nearly-full bag of cool ranch doritos into the giant polished decorative granite fountain by accident, clogs the filter, and gets chewed out harder than a piece of saltwater taffy by karkat. vriska laughs at him, a high pitched witch’s cackle that’s abruptly cut off by a shriek as dave shoves her in the water, and aradia chews four pieces of wintergreen gum at a time getting lipstick stains on her teeth and sollux fake-retches at the almost-tangible feeling of invasive mint in his mouth as she kisses him.

the school play—shakespeare, of course, as it usually is, that or arthur miller (they did _the crucible_ last year, talk about a downer) at their uppity charter high. it’s _hamlet_ this year, karkat confident and stage-savvy in the lead, resplendent in black as the mad prince of denmark. dave plays a sarcastic drawling horatio and his heart thunders jittery in his chest backstage behind the blue velvet curtains as he watches the curve of karkat’s spine as he dramatically mourns _oh now would this too too solid flesh melt and resolve itself into a dew_ and as he grips ophelia _it’s kanaya_ by the thin silk-draped shoulders and shouts and shoves her back across the floor. kanaya skitters off the side of the stage in her blocky plastic heels, theater-tears rolling down her cheeks, pragmatically wiping under her eyes with a manicured hand as she gives dave his cue. sollux and rose play a frustrated, squabbling claudius and gertrude, vriska a vengeful and angry laertes with a sharp tongue and sharper blade. at the climax of the classic work, vriska and rose and sollux lying motionless, carefully sipping breaths as though to appear lifeless, john as fortinbras counting down the seconds to his grand entrance, dave curls like a dying plant _i am more an antique roman than a dane_ clutching the gilded cup over karkat’s prone form; if he loses himself just a bit in his character, if he feels a cresting wave of sorrow at the death of loved ones, if a few unprompted tears leave the corners of his eyes—well. he hopes his sunglasses are as opaque as everybody says they are.

aradia sprint-chases john laughing across the long-abandoned tennis court, silly blue light-up sketchers and battered red converse all-stars dodging weeds sprouting from the cracks in the dusty grey asphalt and skirting over that big round reddish stain by the fraying nylon net where vriska clocked sollux so hard in the eighth grade winter that she knocked out two of his teeth. sollux himself is standing close enough to dave for him to hear the tinny sound of terribad emo music from his headphones (fall out boy? my chemical romance? he doesn’t care enough to ask) and karkat yells for his sister to _slow down, god damn it, before you trip and fall_ and dave fails to hold back a grin as john stops short and aradia does just that, _oh shit_ flailing wildly as she goes down into the soft grass. dave nudges sollux—sollux blinks, behind his glasses, but that means nothing. everyone blinks. even vriska, from time to time, when she remembers. speak of the devil, the girl herself comes up behind dave and flings her arms around his neck, pressing her grin into the back of his collar. fear seizes him so badly that his lungs make panicked bids for freedom right up and out of his throat; at least, until aradia greets vriska from the ground, and dave relaxes. _nowadays you never know whos gonna get you from behind,_ he says fake-serious to vriska’s elbow as she laughs her machine gun laugh into his polyester shirt. _nowadays? all you know is nowadays,_ says karkat. _you were born in nowadays._

dave’s nine when he meets any of them to begin with—it starts with john and builds up like a lego tower. fresh out of sticky-hot houston in the custody of his brothers and sister _don’t think about it_ scars criss-crossing his chest and back and arms _don’t think about it_ but he does, of course he does, how can’t he? he’s a _kid_ , a kid who witnessed a _murder_ , who saw the radiant roxy lalonde with a look on her face like she’d been sent to kill captain america covered in blood (only half of it was hers), who watched unblinking through a pair of sunglasses as his oldest brother sprouted the sharp end of the firebrand hal strider’s thin blade through his chest like a heavy metal pendant, and even though he’s always been unflappable and his temperance might be carved from marble dirk strider is still a fragile, warm human and every sixteen-year-old screams when a fucking sword skewers the soft flesh of his palm like a fourth of a set of ugly stigmata. john listens to the story, chewing on his knuckles, as dave struggles to keep his voice steady. dave attends a birthday party when he’s eleven and that’s where he meets sollux, curled up in a way that’s /got/ to be uncomfortable on the hard-looking wooden bench at the back of the yard with his face in his game boy advance and a look of grim determination on his face. dave sidles up next to him and gives him a plethora of pointers on pokemon blue and sollux scrawls his phone number on dave’s arm in half-dried red pen. dave meets vriska at the public pool when he’s twelve, after she steals his swimming goggles with a sixth-grade giggle and they chase each other around the cement deck in their bare feet until vriska slips sideways on the tile and falls in the shallow end and takes dave with her by the wrist and the tyrannical lifeguard meenah peixes shouts at them from atop her whitewashed wooden throne through a megaphone. dave meets the twins when he’s fourteen, after he sees aradia twirling gracefully at a winter dance, hand clasped in karkat’s with their arms hooked around each others' waists. they’ve been close their whole lives, but they were more so then—more of a unit, you know, _megidoandvantas, karkatandaradia_. he quite literally runs into them in the middle of the floor, sticks the heel of his too-small dress shoe into the hem of aradia’s skirt, and almost goes flying before two identical pairs of skinny ninth-grade arms were around his middle and two laughing heads of dark brown hair were mere inches from his own.

year thirteen is a year of injuries. aradia sticks a fork in the toaster on a snow-gray january morning and the whole kitchen smells like burnt toast and corroded batteries for a month after, john pays sollux five dollars to lick a piece of raw lapis lazuli and laughs hard enough to give himself an asthma attack at the look on sollux’s face when the soluble stone leaves a blue smudge on his tongue, karkat swiftly climbs and then proceeds to immediately fall out of the massive bark-rough maple tree in vriska’s backyard. he breaks his wrist and aradia burns her hand and sollux’s saliva is blue-tinged for a full four days. john gets food poisoning from the fried rice at that sketchy chinese restaurant on mack avenue and vriska goes to the hospital with a thousand shards of that fragile sort of foil-glass embedded in the soles of her feet from stepping on a christmas ornament. dave falls off a pontoon boat into lake huron and the coast guard has to come pick him up and sollux laughs for weeks at the memory of dave shadesless, frowning, dripping with algae-ridden lake water standing childishly on the deck of a military speedboat, and karkat smacks him on the back of the head.

they start a band in the twins’ garage, soundproof the walls the best they can and lock the chipping-paint door. karkat’s on the worn-out drum set, john’s on keyboard. vriska’s on fore and sollux’s on bass, torn-up blue jeans and bare feet kicked up on a leslie cabinet, and aradia and dave sing. aradia’s voice is high and clear and whip-quick like a popping lightning strike, her sleek auburn hair in a static-fueled halo around her soft heart-shaped face, even her rowdiest shrieks as melodious as a well-tuned violin. dave’s is a monotone baritone by contrast, suited more to talk-song than shout-song, his lyrics slurring together with the speed of his low voice and his sunglasses glinting in the light of the flash paper-covered light bulb they’re using for a glowing stage light. vriska and sollux tear at their strings and karkat beats the drums into submission and john wails on his keys and dave and aradia scream loud enough to shake the speakers, imagining they’re playing a sold out show at joe louis arena, until the moment is shattered as damara bangs on the wall with her fist and shouts for them to _be quiet, ファックのために, the walls are vibrating._

karkat and vriska pull dave into karkat’s five-year-old beat-up hand-me-down paintpeeling rust-red dodge caravan that isn’t even his yet, not technically, because the lease is still in kankri’s name and karkat had to nick the keys from damara’s dresser, and run away for a weekend, eyes bright and smiles wild, wrecking themselves on spent matchsticks and stolen alcohol and cheap cigarettes and quick, fleeting blue-lipsticked kisses, sleeping curled up together in the minivan’s way-backseat before slinking home almost-guilty three days later in the dead of night to dirk and kankri and aranea’s ire, scarred-knuckle fingers and skinny bony legs woven in a web and galaxy-freckled skin streaked with spray paint and hickeys and the worst episode of some dungeons and dragons nerd podcast playing over the tinny phone speaker. someone yanks the shitty stick shift and switches gears into neutral going twenty miles over the speed limit down a twice-paved hill pockmarked with storm drains and summer-sticky tar pools and vriska whoops like she’s at a goddamn rock concert, her head poking out the passenger window and her wild hair flying out behind her like the tail of a dark comet, and karkat tips his whole torso over the console to attempt to wrench a laughing dave’s hands off the steering wheel.

john balances vriska who holds dave who lifts karkat who hoists aradia up the rickety ladder to the loft in sollux’s garage that’s lit by a lamp with a torn shade and a string of half-dead christmas lights. the squat-ceilinged room with sprucewood rafters holds the skunk smell of long-smoked weed and the sick-sweet smell of some sort of rotting fruit (yeah, it’s totally that petrified tangerine behind the crate in the corner, god damn it, latula) and a staticky television is propped carefully against the far wall between john’s old xbox 360 and the wicker basket holding all its games in their jewel case exoskeletons. dave sits heavily down on a squashy beanbag chair and sollux hisses in anger-pain _mother fucker!_ when his pinky toenail hits the side of mituna’s longboard and bends almost all the way back with a loud crack. john winces and karkat sucks a breath in through his teeth and aradia hands him a blue and red band-aid that sollux takes with a weak laugh. vriska trips over the longboard too less than ten seconds later and she takes aradia down with her like a sack of girl-bricks, both of them tangled together like vines getting splinters in their desert dry-skin elbows, choking on their breathless laughter and facetiously cursing mituna into the glow of the setting sun.

rich kid eridan ampora throws a party for the fourth of july and dave gets his first real, earth-shattering kiss at fifteen years old in a hushed, warm space between his coats. it’s hot and rough and hits the spot, fueled by lukewarm red bull and cheap alcohol, shivering dark against the closet door dead drunk on sour apple pucker with karkat’s tongue between his teeth. it’s full of ragged breath and harsh, rasping _i love you, i love you_ s and a mostly-muffled depeche mode song and vriska’s voice, outside, above all; shouting past the music. dave’s got fingers tangled in karkat’s messy hair and karkat’s got a knee between dave’s legs and really, as the roxy and dirk in the back of his mind cheer him on, he isn’t sure if he’s _ever_ loved anyone else exactly like this before this exact moment, exactly like he does right now. karkat stops short sudden, sighs long and low and drags the flat of his teeth against dave’s collarbone, making him shiver. dave slides a hand down to karkat’s waistband from its position in his hair and karkat’s breath hitches, an unsung _are we really gonna do this here and now? ampora’s gonna kill us_ hanging heavy in their shared breath. dave nods minutely and trails his fingers down down down before a loud _thunk_ on the door from the outside makes both of them jump, dissolving into stifled mood-ruining alcoholic giggles at the sound of a slurring terezi and a _very_ sober john in a childish spat on the other side of the door.

the moon shines fat and oily white on a light-polluted backdrop of navy and maroon where derse street meets prospit avenue above the vantas-megido house, two-story, with a sturdy oak door and vinyl siding and massive red-orange flames licking out the windows like draconian tongues. karkat sits alone, shivering, in the february snow-slick driveway, a soundless litany of _aradia aradia aradia where’s aradia_ slipping from between his chattering teeth as john and dave and vriska tear down the icy street in their pajamas towards the flickering beacon of fire. a pained, frightened scream of _karkat! karkat!_ echoes from somewhere in the backyard and karkat leaps to his feet, squirming madly, fighting in john’s iron grip _my sister my sister you have to get my sister_ clouds of winter breath rising from all four kids as dave holds a shaking vriska on his shoulders so she can hop the fence and unlock the gate from the inside. tears stream down karkat’s face as his mother and his father, kankri and damara all make it out streaked with soot and ash and damara’s ankle is probably (definitely) broken and kankri’s bleeding profusely from his nose and vriska still isn’t back. dave’s ready to hop the gate himself when he sees them, a head of black and a sheet of brown, vriska holding a barely-conscious aradia up by the underarms, exposing a long shiny burn up aradia’s bare leg and dave pulls her up in his arms (he’s far stronger than vriska) and vriska coughs up smokey black-brown bile between the auditory glare of sirens and when he carries aradia back to her family it’s the first and only time in his life _oh my fucking god_ he ever hears karkat’s older brother swear.

they’re sixteen and it’s the cusp between muddy spring and dusty summer when they walk down the sidewalk, shoving each other good-naturedly as they try to find a working arrangement on the pavement that’s just barely wide enough for two, let alone six of them. sollux finds his mind wandering in much the same manner as his legs. he thinks about a long-ago trip to the florida everglades, the heavy swamps where the body-warm water swirls languidly around your ankles and the plants manage to get everywhere you wish they wouldn’t. he remembers the trees, specifically. they swerve a detour to a ragged fence behind the schoolyard and dave holds back the chain link so courteously that karkat’s reluctance to trespass for the third time in one night evaporates fairly quickly. sollux thinks of the interwoven-yet-separate mess of mangroves that he and mituna clambered on, how his bare foot slipped off the slick bark and dunked him underwater, how he forced his eyes open beneath the cloudy ripples and saw the trees’ roots. he remembers that they weren’t separate at all; in fact, they seemed to share a root system. inextricably tangled together, unable to pull apart even if they wanted to. it strikes sollux exactly where he’s seen that before, sees it every single day, sees it in himself. for an arresting moment, sollux is concerned—he can’t live without aradia, and aradia can’t live without dave, and dave can’t live without karkat, and karkat can’t live without john, and john can’t live without vriska, and vriska can’t live without sollux. though, after the anomalous moment fades, he realizes that he doesn’t really mind. aradia hurls herself down the tube slide she’s too small for at top speed and gets stuck when the rubber of her doc martens catches on the riveted seams. john shoves karkat down the slide in a misguided effort to dislodge her and aradia shrieks like she’s having a tooth pulled as her brother’s bony elbow slams into her spine. sollux decides that he definitely doesn’t mind being tangled up with these idiots forever.


End file.
